Week 13

ABCs:

Well, I really am slacking on this. This week I have no excuse for not doing it...except fot hat it's really hard to think of a fairly simple craft using k or x. I think we'll have to do a hokey "xylophone" or something for x... and maybe kick for k? We'll see what I come up with.

Math:

We reviewed addition over ten with "making tens" and subtracting when there aren't enough ones by "decomposing a ten." Abby understands these concepts, but is slow to complete it. She'd much rather solve the problem using an addition sentence she knows: "Eight and two is ten. So...eight and four is twelve!" I'm okay with this as long as she understands HOW to make ten. We call it having the numbers "share."

We are scheduled to really finish up Singapore 1A this week. I need to buy Challenging Word Problems and Intensive Practice. I think those are what we will take on our three-week-vacation next month.

We have also been fiddling with a few puzzles from MEP math. They should be review, but they are a different type of problems than Abby is used to seeing. She's not sure she likes them because they do make her think.

We also did a few review questions that involved having multiple addends. Again, we are trying to do a few things "out of the box" so she is exposed to different types of problems and solutions.

Emmett did some more sums and counting, but nothing formal. He wasn't up for any of that and I don't want to push.

The rods still get played with by Ellie too. Her favorite one is the purple one she tells me. She likes to do what the older kids do. She has no clue she's younger than they are.

Spelling:

We finished off All About Spelling 1 this week. It has been a long time coming since I really dropped how frequently we used the program and also slowed down to a crawl on the lessons we did do. We'll keep reviewing what she's learned, but won't pick up AAS 2 until January.

Reading:

We have been listening to How to Eat Fried Worms on audiobook. We have read a ton of picture books. I still have yet to read the Radish Cure to Abby. I'm really hoping to get to that this week.

Abby has chugged along in her Me and My Monsters book. In her free time, she's been reading Mr. Putty and Tabby books by Cynthia Rylant.

FIAR:

Like nearly everyone using FIAR, we thought it would be a good idea to row Cranberry Thanksgiving this week to prep for Thanskgiving. It's out of print, so I had to request it from the library. I'm actually amazed we got it in in time to row it this week!

Social Studies:

• We could have reviewed the history of Thanksgiving, but I'm planning that for next week. Instead, we discussed where New England is.

Language Arts:

• This book has text all over the place! During one reading, I had Abby point out the different places the manuscript can be placed in a book.

Art:

• One of the last pages of the book has Grandmother, Maggie and Mr. Whiskers sitting in front of the fire, done in silhouettes. We made our own silhouettes and talked reviewed what are considered warm and cool colors.

Science:

• The book has a line which reads, "Mr. Horace was starched" or something to that effect. We discussed starch and what it does.
• We extracted starch from a potato.

• We tested various things with iodine to see if they contained starch. I first showed the kids how the iodine would react with the remnants of our potato project. Then, we tested different foods with the iodine.

• Of course, discussing starch meant we had to play with some oobleck.

Other:

• We also tried out some craisins and cranberry apple juice.

Swim:

This past week was the last week of swim for the year. The next session won't start up again until February.

Emmett did okay in his Level 3/4 class. He is physically capable, but having difficulty honing the maturity needed to really excel with a group class. He worked on dives and endurance most of this session. Next session we will see if he's matured a bit more to really focus in the class. His teacher tells us no four-year-old should be able to do like he does and affectionately calls him a freak of nature.

Abby did okay with her Level 2 class. Her teacher doesn't seem to get through to her with the what is required...she still needs to figure how to breathe during freestyle as well as work on her breast stroke.

Ellie has done well with splitting her time between a preschool class and a mom-and-tot class. She's advanced to the point where she can go a few body lengths on her own and has started to really enjoy swimming. She likes "going under water."

Religion:

This week we read about Nephi retrieving the brass plates. We read the story in several different places. We made Jerusalem with blocks and then destroyed it.

We made brass plates out of graham crackers and frosting and wrote on them with tooth picks.

We also watched the animated version from the Living Scriptures, Nephi and the Brass Plates. While we watched, we each chose a picture from the activity book and colored that page. Then, after the movie, we reviewed by putting our pages in the order they happened.

Other:

I actually enticed Ellie to color a picture the other day. She doesn't care for coloring much, but this was a picture of Baby Jaguar and she is currently in a Diego-is-the-neatest stage.

We made Thanksgiving cards one night. They came out pretty cute.

Lest you think that the older kids are the only ones learning anything, here is Hyrum and his new-ish trick!

(While he looks pretty steady here, the truth is he only sits for about five minutes max before he either folds in half or topples over. Small and steady steps and he'll get better and better!)

Week 12

Well, right when we're starting to wane and I was thinking about pausing for a break, we got word that my husband is slated for a TDY (military-speak for business trip) to Florida. He will have his own hotel room, so we are planning on driving down there and spending time in Florida that week! After that, we'll be heading to my parents' house for Christmas. So, in effect, we will be gone all of December. Which means, I'd like to get us up to speed to basically take all of December off of our regularly-scheduled stuff to do interest-led units. But yay for vacation!

ABCs:

Daddy was off this past Friday, so we skipped our ABCs this week. Instead, we played with Daddy!

Math:

I took a pause with Abby to explore a bit of multiplication and even/odd. They're her interests and I'm letting the other just percolate in her brain. We did review some problems with sums over tens. She grasps adding a single-digit number to the teens really well, though. When she has an addition problem with a sum over ten she either has her "numbers share" (make a ten) or she reasons it another way ("Well, seven and seven is fourteen...so seven and eight must be fifteen!"). I'm fine with either as long as she is still manipulating those numbers rather than rote memorization.

Emmett reviewed counting and placing things in the correct place. I'm slowly starting him with some Miquon and a few things lifted from MEP. He loves the MEP material...probably because it feels a bit like figuring a puzzle.

Spelling:

We did step 23 (of 24!) in AAS this week. It discusses plurals and adding "s" or "es" to make something plural.

I could have moved on further, but I'm trying to have AAS level 1 last until January, so we're going slowly with lots of review. Lately I've been dictating the dictation phrases, then having her use them for some copywork too.

Reading:

I hardly got to read any Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle aloud this week, which was a big bummer. We are still on the Radish Cure, which is my favorite part!

Abby did read some to me. I read about the series Me and My Monsters and thought Abby would like it. I downloaded the Kindle version because I thought she'd think it was fun to do some of her reading on the iPad.

I just found out it is also the basis for a show in Britain. It's not the greatest literature, but as long as she enjoys it, it'll be good.

FIAR:

We were expecting a big storm on Monday, so we rowed Storm in the Night this week. Apparently I was slacking on taking FIAR-related photos, though.

Social Studies:

• In the book, there is a big storm and Grandfather tells a story about when he was a little boy and afraid of a big storm. We discussed fears and bravery and wrote down some of our own fears.

Language Arts:

• We revisited the onomatopoeia! One reading, we just counted all of the words we could find that sounded like a sound. Abby counted over 10 words!

Art:

• The FIAR manual has a great lesson for art on acrylics. I didn't have any so we pointed out how the droplets are white and why the illustrator could paint them like that. Then, we talked about the difference with watercolors and did some color resist paintings.

Science:

• We reviewed the water cycle and storms a bit.
• We also discussed electricity and thunder.

Extra:

• Of course, I let the kids watch and play in the rain!

Religion:

Emmett has been a bit of a handful of late--part of it is being four, and part of it is his innately strong will. I've been struggling with him obeying, and not just out of fear, but for the right reasons. I've started taking him aside and each morning just reading one article from the Friend.

The first day I did this, I noticed an article talking about how Primary children around the world now number one million. There is a song to go along and video of 30 kids around the world. So, in addition to being read an article from the Friend, Emmett listens to the song, sings it, and then we watch a video. He then colors a star for that child and places it on our world map. We currently have six stars in different places: Alaska, California, Minnesota, Ontario, Nigeria and Madagascar.

He was very resistant to this in the beginning: "Why do I have to?" "I don't wanna do this..." and trying everything to annoy me into stopping. Within the last week, though, he has been excited to watch his video and asks to do more than one a day. Unfortunately, he has not been very open to me documenting such happenings with the camera. Maybe this next week he will be...

Abby and Ellie watch along, but this is particularly Emmett's thing. I'm wanting to spend some one-on-one time with him, teach him to love and know the Savior, and also encourage him to realize and understand that he is an awesome little boy who is "uniquely individual - one of a kind" and hopefully he will continue to strive to "be what Heavenly Father has in mind."

One day, they wrote notes to the kids they have seen on the videos. Emmett's was a bunch of scribbles and was demolished before I could snap a picture. I did get one of Abby's, though.

We have also started a bit more of an intensive study of the Book of Mormon. We began our own Book of Mormon notebook and this week we discussed Joseph Smith and how we got the Book of Mormon. We came at the story a few different ways to really cement the story and how it happened into the kids' heads. We watched the scripture story video, we read the story in our My First Church History book, then again in our Book of Mormon Stories book. We watched The Joseph Smith story, and, of course, read the account in Joseph Smith--History. I had the kids draw pictures and we all memorized James 1:5. Retention was pretty high! This week we'll be moving on to Nephi retrieving the brass plates.

Week 11

ABCs:

We typically do our weekly letter on Friday. Well, this week it didn't even pass into my thought...so we skipped it unintentionally this week. We only have two letters to finish up our alphabet, though!

Math:

Abby moved into the section on numbers larger than ten. We have occasionally called numbers such as 18 "one-ten-eight" or 26 "two-tens-six-units" so the idea that 12 was a "ten and a two" was not foreign to her.

We made it as far as introducing the idea of making a ten to solve addition problems with a sum over ten. The first day I introduced it, it was obviously a new concept and I could see her mind stretching as she tried to grasp the idea. The next day, it was fine and she could figure out how to complete such problems without prompting. We still have stopped here and will play with the idea for a bit while she completes some sheets in her Miquon book. Luckily, some of these sheets go over the exact same "make ten" concept.

She has been fascinated with the concept of odd or even, so one day I had her figure out what each number was and Emmett scribed an "O" or "E" on our number line. By the time he got to 4 or 5, Emmett would shout out the answer at each number too.

Emmett has been very interested in math of late, including proclaiming things like "3 and 3 makes 6!" or "1 and 2 is 3!" or "if Abby has 5, I have 2, and Ellie has 1, how many do we have altogether?" So, I've started him with some very basic Miquon-esque activities. The whole point of these is to really familiarize him with the rods.

And while they are our main manipulative, every once in a while, Abby still feels the whim to build something with the rods. This is her "royal bridge."

Spelling:

Abby is doing very well with AAS1 and is fairly good with remembering the rules that she has learned. We are parking it for a portion, though, because she has a hard time hearing the difference between the /nk/ sounds and /ck/. This week we spelled a lot of our review words, but did not get to the next lesson, which is on plural words.

Reading:

Abby picked up Yertle the Turtle at the library on Tuesday. It's been good to have her read to me because it is slightly easy for her still (though, the Book Wizard has it at a 3.8 reading level?), has some nonsense words to discourage guessing (what Dr. Seuss book does not? :)) and still interests her.

We are continuing on with me reading Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle aloud. We just finished the Selfishness Cure and are coming up on the Radish Cure, which is one of my favorites.

We are still working on some pre-blending/phonemic awareness activities with Emmett. In all reality, there isn't much I can do with him in this area besides read a lot to him. He knows all of his letter sounds, but is developmentally not ready to blend words. We talk about what words begin or end with, what rhymes, play "Say it Fast" and other things.

Unit Study:

We kept up with How to Make a Cherry Pie, but somehow I got so busy teaching that I forgot to take photos. We did the Pledge of Allegiance everyday, talked about the National Anthem and listened to it fairly regularly. We watched episodes of Liberty's Kids. Next week, we will be jumping back in with FIAR.